Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Te Ara exhibition opens in Vancouver

Launches
new trilingual book featuring Musqueam alongside Māoriand English

The
exhibition Te Ara: Māori Pathways of Leadership, opens today in
Vancouver, Canada, in the final stage of its world tour before returning to New
Zealand in February 2014.

Featuring photographs by Krzysztof Pfeiffer taken over a five-year
period, and curated by Paul Tapsell and Merata Kawharu, Te Ara is a visual
survey of leadership in the Māori
world – past, present and future. It premiered in Poland in 2010 and has since shown
at major museums in the UK and Germany.

The exhibition is being hosted by the Musqueam Indian Band, the First
Peoples of the Vancouver area, and is showing at the Musqueam Gallery in the
British Columbian capital.

Accompanying the opening was the launch of the third
edition of the exhibition book. Te Ara
features photographs from the exhibition with extended text by Paul Tapsell
reviewing

leadership
and challenges for Māori today.

The book is believed to be the first featuring both
Canadian and New Zealand indigenous languages, with a landmark Musqueam
translation – one of very few texts in the language – alongside Te Reo Māori and English. Copies
are available in Canada and New Zealand.

"Our conversation is indigenous to
indigenous with the Musqueam, but it is a story to which everyone is invited to
come along and listen in," said Tapsell, who is visiting Vancouver.

Te
Ara: Māori Pathways of Leadership will be at the
Musqueam Gallery, 4000 Musqueam Avenue, Vancouver, until 28 February 2014.

Professor
Paul Tapsell and Associate Professor Merata Kawharu teach in the Māori Studies department at the University of Otago, Dunedin; Krzysztof Pfeiffer
is an internationally recognised photographer based in Auckland who has contributed
to more than 35 books.